It’s an extraordinary record: six artists sustaining a unique partnership and creating work together for over 40 years. From its beginnings in Sheffield in the 1980s, through four decades of work in venues and festivals across the world, the multi-award-winning Forced Entertainment has earned a reputation as a unique UK contemporary performance company reinventing theatre on the international stage in simple and complicated ways.
FE @ 40 is an opportunity to reflect on that astonishing journey. In this 40th birthday year, Forced Entertainment plan to explore and (re)discover not only the company’s history but also its future. It’s going to be a packed year.
To start, Forced Entertainment want to share a landmark project with online audiences. From 19 February video recordings of all the group’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare performances will be made available online, for free, to be watched, enjoyed and shared.
A salt and pepper pot for the king and queen. A vase for the prince. A matchbox for the servant. A toilet roll tube for the Innkeeper. A water bottle for the messenger.
In the group’s groundbreaking project Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare six performers create condensed versions of all of the Shakespeare plays, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one metre stage of an ordinary table top. Presented live in cities around the world since 2016 and then online during the lockdowns of 2020-2021, Complete Works explores Shakespeare’s 36 Comedies, Tragedies, Histories and late plays. What follows is simple and idiosyncratic, absurd and strangely compelling as, through a kind of lo-fi, home-made puppetry, the stories of the plays come to life in vivid miniature.
Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works was the first time the company had approached dramatic literature and the Shakespearean legacy and the project has served as both a compelling introduction to the texts and a contemporary reinvention of them.. The result is a kind of levelling of the plays – a gently comic re-casting of them via objects from the kitchen cabinet and grocery store shelves – as well as a celebration of their power as stories, and the act of storytelling and theatre itself.
In Forced Entertainment’s bold new work for theatres, Signal to Noise, the stage becomes a hallucinatory expanse across which lone figures drift, dance, run, spring and crawl, isolated but always joined in the connection of possible and impossible stories. There are dances and confrontations, chance encounters and drunken meanderings, moments of confusion, shared joy, stillness and delirium. AI voices haunt a musical score of filmic atmospheres, slowed classical strings, beats, trumpets and birdsong, looping Etchells’ text of thoughts, speeches, promises, and questions. And in a world that is neither day nor night, the performers become lip-syncers for the stories and emotions of these disembodied never-bodied speakers.
Created as the company celebrates its 40th Birthday, Signal to Noise is Forced Entertainment’s theatre at its best – a powerful mix of performance magic and off-hand deconstruction, a simple idea taken to its limit that opens a unique space for the thoughts, laughter and reflections of spectators.
Signal to Noise has its world premiere in Essen at PACT (21 – 23 March) before embarking on a Europe-wide tour including Hau, Berlin (24 – 26 April); Holland Festival (16 – 18 June) and Epidaurus Festival Athens (26 & 27 June). It arrives at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall (10 & 11 October, ) for the UK premiere as part of a London Season then travels to Cambridge Junction (16 – 17 October) and ACCA Brighton (23 – 24 October) before heading back to Europe including Theatre 140 Brussels (12 – 13 November) and Viernulvier, Gent (15 – 16 November), and ends the year in France with visits to Paris and Toulouse.
Also at the Southbank Centre will be the first ever performance of a new collaboration between Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director Tim Etchells and acclaimed percussionist Tony Buck (founder-member of Australian trio The Necks): Go On Like This (12-13 October, Purcell Room). In this ‘performance encounter’ the two artists share a fascination with the possibilities of both free improvisation and intensive repetition, bringing them together for an evening of loops and cacophonies.
Also featured in the Southbank Centre residency part of the London season is a revival of the company’s classic durational work, 12am: Awake and Looking Down (9 November, Clore Ballroom). Five silent performers using simple dress-up, inhabiting a seemingly endless parade of characters is a transfixing performance that questions what’s in a name. Physical and highly visual, it starts with a vast and constantly growing catalogue of names – from ‘Frank (Drunk)’ to ‘The Hypnotised Girl’, via ‘Elvis Presley (the Dead Singer)’ and ‘A Nine Year-Old Shepherd Boy’, and explores exhaustion and endurance to create a unique event that is comic, mesmeric and moving.
The second venue in the London season, The Place will present Shown and Told by Damaged Goods (31 October – 2 November), a dynamic performance collage, balancing fixed material and possibilities for free-play. Arising from an exchange between Tim Etchells and internationally renowned choreographer Meg Stuart, it exposes their different practices and sensibilities, exploring the relationship between movement, image and performing bodies. A conversation that is tough, touching and comical by turns.
At Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) the London season features L’Addition (5 – 9 November & 12 – 16 November, Council Chamber) and last year’s If All Else Fails (19 – 23 November).
In L’Addition, two performers are armed with (or trapped in) a single scene – a customer orders a drink from a waiter. And then things go awry. Played again and again, the events of this stock-situation roll repeatedly with nonstop dialogue or absolute silence and the scene starts spinning out of control. Nightmarish spiral or grotesque farce? Roles and relationships of power flip back and forth, to the point that we no longer know who’s the target and who’s the aggressor, who’s serving and who’s being served.
Directed by Forced Entertainment artistic director Tim Etchells, and created with the brilliant performance duo Bert and Nasi, L’Addition orchestrates a complex, hilarious and explosive performance from simple materials. Together, the three of them play with the mechanisms of theatre as much as with power relationships — but in the end, someone has to pay the bill.
L’Addition will also be performed earlier in the year at HAU Berlin (25 – 26 April).
In If All Else Fails, two performers engage in an absurd test that seems to shift and change as they work their way through it. Fragments of a language lesson. Questions from a personality quiz. Slogans from some future society. The performers laugh, hesitate, ask for more time. The test continues. As the clock ticks it’s not even certain if the subjects of the test are the audience or the performers. Comical and tangled If All Else Fails is a collaboration with dancer/maker/choreographer Seke Chimutengwende. Performed by Chimutengwende and Cathy Naden, one of the founder members of the group, the piece is a dialogue of speech and movement, questions and answers. If All Else Fails will also travel to Lisbon (12 – 13 September).
Elsewhere in the year, and in the world, more back catalogue highlights will be revived including the monologue To Move In Time (30 May, Kunstenfestpiele, Hannover) written by Tim Etchells for Tyrone Huggins, with many more to be announced.
For more information and tickets visit forcedentertainment.com.Â
